tool or script to enable or disable HD spinning

First post.

I would like the ability to manually enable or disable an internal hard drive, ideally to physically start or stop it spinning.

I would use this feature to fire-up an secondary drive, copy files to it for backup, then spin it down. I have done quite a bit of searching and found nothing. It seems to me it would be a usefull tool.

I have two five year old systems at home running win 2000 SP4, Pentium 4, 1.4Mhz, 500MB and 1GB respectively (Dell Precisioin 330 workstations). Both PCs have two EIDE hard drives running by cable select.

The simple things I have tried from the BIOS level are ignored once the OS starts up, it spins up the disabeld drive. To me having a second drive for occassional backup and keeping it spinning and accessable 100% of the time is an oxymoronic condition.

w/o a software solution, I don't know if a hardware on/off (wire the power connector out to an external switch) would work. assume some magic SW stuff to get the OS and drivers on alert to the new HD status.

Dave in Denver

 

Unless you use the Linux OS (which you said you aren't) I dont' think think you can have one drive spin down while using another one. The only way I know of to spin drives down is to set them to sleep after a certain amount of time in the power management settings.